Imperial Triumphant have signed to Metal Blade Records, and the record that comes with the deal is already tracked.
That order is the interesting part. A label usually signs a band and then waits a year or more for a record. Here the New Yorkers finished the sessions first, with Colin Marston recording and mixing as he has since their earliest days, which means the deal was negotiated around something both sides could already hear.
They arrive with four albums behind them that nobody else could have made: Vile Luxury in 2018, Alphaville in 2020, Spirit Of Ecstasy in 2022 and Goldstar last year, each one pushing black and death metal into jazz and modern classical writing. Marston once said the band had got their playing and tones to the point where the music itself provides all the necessary strangeness, which is as good a description of them as anyone has managed.
The band put it their own way: Metal Blade is the top floor of the recording label tower and the view from up here is quite nice.
A shirt marks the signing, with the Metal Blade axe crossed with the band's gold mask, drawn by Noah Cutter Meihoff. Twenty one European and British dates with Knoll start on 13 November in Belfort and finish in Glasgow on 6 December.